Empire Life boost power and save space with Fujitsu M10-1 server

"The Fujitsu M10-1 server is a powerful tool. If you want to start small, you can grow with it through CPU core activation, which is a nice feature."

Jeff Babcock,
Manager of IT Infrastructure, Empire Life

The customer

Founded in 1923, The Empire Life Insurance Company (Empire Life) is among the top 10 life insurance companies in Canada, offering competitive individual and group life and health insurance, investment and retirement products. With more than 690,000 individual customers and group life and health plan members as well as 815 group retirement plans, Empire Life helps Canadians build wealth and protect their financial security. Headquartered in Kingston, Ontario, Empire Life has partnerships with almost 30,000 professional financial advisors, brokers, managing general agents, group producers and mutual fund dealers across Canada.

Committed to simplicity and being easy to do business with, Empire Life recently launched the first online life insurance application process that includes underwriting, payment and e-signature components. Citing this new technology as well as ongoing product and service enhancements that support customer satisfaction, Empire Life was named the Best Life Insurance Company in Canada in 2014 by World Finance magazine for a second year in a row.

The challenge

Empire Life wanted to move to a fully virtualized and modern environment that would enable it to become much more agile, avoid potential compliance issues and be better prepared for worst-case scenarios. The company’s existing environment included a number of Solaris-based applications running on either physical or virtual SPARC servers – mostly older, slower systems that could no longer support the needs of the organization and had reached end of life.

The solution

With support from Toronto-based HighVail, a full-service technology enabler, Empire Life was able to consolidate its existing SPARC infrastructure – almost four racks of servers - down to a single Fujitsu M10-1 server, enabling Empire Life to run existing Solaris 8, 9 and 10 environments on a single server. By consolidating to just a single Fujitsu M10-1 server with a SPARC64 X processor, Empire Life benefits from a 92 percent savings in power and a 97 percent savings in rack space.

The benefit

Consolidated almost four racks of SPARC servers down to a single Fujitsu M10-1 (able to run existing Oracle Solaris 8, Solaris 9 and Solaris 10 environments on the same physical server)

Estimated 92 percent savings in power and a 97 percent saving in rack space